758 CONSERVATION , 



diurnal nightmare for the incredible un- icans have been holding in a dreamy 



intelligence which refuses immediate way, but which a few great minds have 



expenditure of that 100,000,000 which foreseen as an accomplished thing in 



will save 1,000,000,000 a year, and future time, of a superlative destiny for 



possibly the future of our race. The fu- this new western world, this world of 



ture belongs to those nations who own the morn and the dew, this world whose 



the soil and rule the sea whose peo- vast fallow and fecund wildernesses 



pie shall have to use and not to abuse have lain so long in the dark, while suc- 



the natural resources of the earth, cessive civilizations have depleted the 



There is no future to any nation with- potentiality of the larger and antipodal 



out these. hemisphere where so much of humanity 



The time has come in the history has grown old and gray, 



of western civilization for a new poli- "America," says Hegel, "is the land 



tics. There is something wrong with of the future, where, in the age that 



our politics ; there is something the lies before us, the burden of the world's 



matter with our theory of life Indi- history shall reveal itself. * It is 



vidualism. Anglo-Saxondom, in par- the land of 'desire for all those who are 



ticular, is losing ground, and on the weary of the historical lumber-room of 



racial escutcheon should be blazoned old Europe. Napoleon is reported to 



WASTE. Individualism made the Anglo- have said: 'Cctte vicille Europe m'en- 



Saxon great, but it cannot keep him nuie' It is for America to abandon the 



great. Individualism has ceased to be ground on which hitherto the history of 



true. Once we wanted protest prot- the world has developed itself. What 



estantism ; reform reformation ; revolt has taken place in the New World up 



revolution. Now we want something to the present time is only an echo of 



else, something archetectonic we want the Old World - - the expression of a 



overmind -"oversoul." The infallible foreign life." 1 



inspiration of the gospel of helter- Mr. Roosevelt has worked out his 

 skelter is succumbing to the higher crit- idea on rational and constitutional and 

 icism of the science of economic geog- human lines. This was his task. His 

 raphy. For in the United States things struggles for a square deal for the corn- 

 can never be again as if Theodore mon people have been successful. His 

 Roosevelt had never been. He has not geographical economics have been un- 

 merely given us the idea; he has em- paralleled. But his chief distinction is 

 bodied the idea in an immortal, scien- that he has given an ethical and con- 

 tific achievement. His politics means structive democracy a chance, for the 

 that the principles of intelligence, sci- first time on the Western Hemisphere, 

 entifically applied to the physical condi- on principles which, avoiding both an- 

 tions of life in North America, have archy and socialism, shall conserve the 

 not only made progress possible, but ends of liberty, not merely as an end 

 acceleration of that progress possible, in itself, but as the condition of a na- 

 It means the quintuplication of the eco- tional moral perfection, 

 nornic resources of the people of the Facing the failure of the democracy 

 great Mississippi Basin. It means the of individualism, already about re- 

 renaissance and enrichment of the duced to its lowest terms of economic 

 South, and vast good to central Canada, slavery and financial despotism, and so- 

 It means this because one man had cialism ready to occupy the field by rea- 

 sense enough to know that things could son of sheer want of another, and more 

 not get themselves scientifically done by rational, program, he is the first Amer- 

 themselves ; that progress is rational, ican statesman who has wrought into 

 not fortuitous. What he has already deeds a fundamental body of doctrine 

 achieved is the guarantee of what his involving a rationalization and moral- 

 scientific policies have promised, and a ization of the American democracy, 

 warrant for the hope which most Amer- The foundations of the new construct- 



1 Lecture delivered winter of 1830-31. 



